Ukraine in the eyes of foreign travelers from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries
Every culturally developed nation has and respects its legends pleasant to the ear about its past. Many human generations have accumulated a wealth of historical facts, events, and occurrences to suit their own moral and patriotic needs. These often became the plots for spectacular epic movies and television miniseries. We Ukrainians should also feel no embarrassment about remembering our own past, and here I mean not just myths but at least what foreign travelers wrote in their experiences in Ukraine or what has been recorded in old statistics.
Then why not set off immediately, in our mild and sunbathed autumn, on a voyage to those olden times, “when we still were Cossacks” and Ukrainians, instead of “shooting and charging with swords in hand from trenches and ambushes,” lived a quiet life, plowed their fields, smoked their pipes, drank ale, and impressed foreigners?
In essence, Europeans began to rediscover Ukrainians as a people, a “Cossack nation,” in the early sixteenth century. What drew outlanders’ attention was the “Cossack nation’s” economy, everyday life, and language, which they considered wondrously melodious. Frenchman Pierre Chevalier, author of A History of the War of the Cossacks against Poland, having become acquainted with the Ukrainians, discovered much appealing and heroic in them. In this vein he wrote, “The Cossacks’ language is very tender and full of diminutives and incredibly endearing expressions.” Chevalier also gives a more balanced and unbiased description of the 1648-1654 revolution than do Polish historians.
Foreign travelers began to sketch ethnographic portraits of the Ukrainians, pointing out their characteristic ethnic features, such as hospitality, inclination to order and cleanliness, respect for woman and her equality with man, particularly, in the economic life. I will add here what the Dominican monk Okolski wrote in the sixteenth century: “Although there is not a single duke, senator, or voyevoda (military governor) among the Cossacks..., they are the kind of plebeians who could, if their rights were not restricted, produce dignified figures equal in valor to Themistocles and Quinctius Cincinnatus who, rose from farmer to dictator.” Let us note the following important fact. The Left Bank (of the Dnipro) attracted emigrants from the Western Ukrainian lands of Galicia, Volyn, and Podillia at various periods of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This is essentially how the Ukrainian ethnicity and the common Ukrainian language were formed. Any kind of enmity or alienation between the easterners and westerners was unimaginable at the time. The Sambir- born Petro Konashevych, a.k.a. Sahaidachny, was one of the greatest Ukrainian hetmans, a renowned Kyiv art patron, and a benefactor of the Kiev Mohyla College. Many born in Galicia, after graduating from this institution of higher education, went on to teach there, becoming famous scholars and church figures. Thanks to West Ukrainian immigrants, for example, the number of households in the Kyiv voyevodstvo (region) increased from 38,990 to 70,235, nearly doubling in the 1630s. Historical sources say, “Peasants would gather in a large group and go after long preparation to the new lands together with their women, children, cattle, sheep, and all their things.” Mastering the Wild Steppes and settling new villages, they would tell the local gentry and authorities, “We are free people, so we will go wherever we want if you cause us any harm here!” The Ukrainian peasants were unaware of serf-holding Muscovy’s practice of allowing peasants to move only on St. Yuri’s Day.
Syrian traveler Paul of Aleppo, well known among our historians, visited Ukraine in 1653-55 and left interesting reminiscences, some fragments of which are worth quoting here. Passing through the Bratslav region in the summer of 1653, he saw “long fields wide as the sea” of harvested grain along the road for two to three hours on end, as well as fields of wheat, rye, barley, oats, buckwheat, millet, flax, and hemp.” “On the villages and towns he wrote, “Every house is surrounded by a garden growing cherry, plum, and other trees, with cabbages, turnips, parsley, onions and so on within.” He found wondrous the great number of horses, cows, sheep, swine, and poultry like geese and chickens. He also noted numerous fish ponds and lakes. “There is rainwater or flowing water pond near every small town or village,” the traveler wrote. And there were mills everywhere, “in every small town and village.” Paul of Aleppo saw near the town of Buky four mills on one dam, “with clever contrivances and appliances for all manner of work, such as threshing the grain, cereals, malt, and flax, and felting the fabric.” The ponds and mills were owned or leased by well-to-do peasants.
What this traveler noticed can be supplemented by the notes of the Swedish and Venetian ambassadors, Hildebrandt and Vimina, respectively, who visited Chyhyryn, the Hetmanate capital, at about the same time. The Swede recalls Ukrainian hospitality, meaning a foreigner will not be at a loss in this country: on the contrary, he is quite a desirable guest if he has something to pay with. “The residents of every locality (even those of the frontier areas suffering from enemy attacks) would bring us chickens, eggs, wheat bread, vodka, beer, honey, oats, and horse fodder.” Vimina points at the wide currency of cabbages, cucumbers, and other vegetables, reflecting the dietary habits of the local population. In many places, peasants and urban dwellers had their own apiary estates, with a yield of 15 poods (1 pood = 16 kilograms) of honey.
It would be wrong to regard Ukraine of that time as a completely rural country, It might come as a surprise to somebody that in the 1640s, i.e., before the Cossack Revolution, the then Ukraine comprised about 1000 towns. Particularly, towns and townships (minus Kyiv) accounted for more than 50% of the Left Bank (including the Kyiv voyevodstvo ) population: in other words, 38,977 out of 70,235 households lived in urban areas (from Ivan Krypyakevych’s monograph, Bohdan Khmelnytsky). Thanks to crafts, industry, and trade, the towns yielded five to ten times more income than did the villages on the basis of which they had emerged.
These towns show some interesting statistics: in Novi Mlyny there were 150 merchants (29%) and 93 craftsmen (16%) out of 527 inhabitants, in Baturyn 90 merchants (24%) and 36 craftsmen (10%) out of 365 townspeople, and in Pereyaslav 73 merchants (26%) and 109 craftsmen (39%) out of 274. The towns and townships enjoyed self-government under the Magdeburg Law. Basic self-government in the form of headmen, also applied to the newly-founded villages.
All urban areas developed crafts, small industry, and trade, thereby forming a local market. Had Ukrainian statehood survived and developed, these local markets would undoubtedly have formed a single national market even then.
The then Ukrainian merchants were mostly oriented toward trade with Western and Southern Europe, with Breslau (now Wroclaw), Danzig (Gdansk), K Ъ nigsberg (Kaliningrad), and Lipsk (Leipzig) being important outlets for Ukrainian exports, but there were also direct contacts with Holland and France. The main items of export were oxen (documents record the instances of 500-1000 head being driven from some areas to markets), bread, potash, vodka, tobacco, honey, wax, yarn, hides, salt, and more.
Women also took part in commerce, and not just locally. It is known that Ukrainian women innkeepers sometimes went to towns across the Muscovite border. Paul of Aleppo wrote that in early modern Ukraine, “Women sell various brocades, sables, etc., in beautiful shops; they are well dressed and attend to their work.” And he goes on to state, “In the villages, everyone can read and knows the procedure of church service and liturgical singing; moreover, the priests teach orphans so that they do not continue to hang around in the streets doing nothing... And women go to church with a prayer book in hand.”
Paul had spent over a year in Moscow, watching how the top tsarist courtiers lived. He wrote that he felt “as if a padlock were hanging on my heart, my thoughts were deeply depressed, for nobody feels free and merry in the Muscovite land,” but when he came to Ukraine, “the land of Cossacks,” he immediately noted that the people “were more friendly, affectionate, and treated us as their compatriots.”
Some today might not like such enthusiasm for and favorable comparison of the then Ukraine with its northern neighbor from the mouth of foreign travelers, but, like they say, “you can’t throw the words out of the song.” So I will also quote two later English travelers cited by prominent Ukrainian historian Dmytro Doroshenko, who himself hailed from a famous Cossack family. One of them, Joseph Marchall, traveled across Chernihiv region in 1768-70 and wrote in his diary among other things that when passing through the villages he felt as safe as “in the finest English county,” while the Ukrainian people’s nature, in his opinion, was “extremely mild and pleasing,” while “many things here remind me of England.” Another gentleman, Edouard D. Clarke, wrote in 1800 on a tour of northeastern Ukraine that only in Holland and Norway had he seen such “neatness and cleanliness” as he had in the Ukrainian countryside: “The Ukrainian peasant is neater at the table,” we can read in his book, “than some of the Moscow dukes.”
Doroshenko adds, “He (Clarke) was extremely shocked by the contrast in the everyday life between Russia and Ukraine, so words failed him to praise “the Ukrainians’ honesty, friendliness, hospitality, and industry “ (An Outline of Ukrainian History, vol. II, p. 211).
Here I have invented nothing; I have only retold what others have said. When and why all this began to decline and fall to what Taras Shevchenko wrote about with pain is a different question.
